Wait for the Ryan Express

It appears that the Republican Party establishment  is coalescing around a White Knight who might save them from multiple, self-inflicted disasters, in 2016. The scenario is a surprising one -- and yet eerily familiar.  But first...

Newly selected House Speaker Paul Ryan is crowing about a spectacular accomplishment… getting his GOP majority to allow debate and then passage of a bipartisan transportation & infrastructure bill.... the first in ten years. As noted in one of my earlier postings, Republicans have strenuously blocked any substantial sums being used on infrastructure repair for one simple reason....

 .....such funds stimulate jobs with high-velocity money, instantly spent by lower middle class workers, as opposed to super-low-velocity cash transfers to aristocracy, in vain hope they'll invest it in productive “supply side” industry. (They don't.) I'll talk more about the Infrastructure Bill, below.  

Also my weird scenario for how Paul Ryan might yet become the Republicans’ 2016 presidential nominee. Sound far-fetched? Preparations are being made, as we speak, due to the Donald Trump Effect. 

"Republican officials and leading figures in the party’s establishment are now preparing for the possibility of a brokered convention as businessman Donald J. Trump continues sit atop the polls and the presidential race. (With almost-equally unacceptable Ted Cruz and Ben Carson picking up most of the rest of support from the GOP base.) More than 20 of (GOP power brokers) convened Monday for a dinner held by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus...the party’s establishment must lay the groundwork for a floor fight, in which the GOP’s mainstream wing could coalesce around an alternative...."

To be clear, Mr. Ryan, who as speaker will also serve as chairman of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer, said he would strongly support any Republican nominee. Yet he said "he believed that congressional Republicans must set a policy agenda that offered a clear contrast to the angry insurgent refrain blasting into the winter primaries." 

In other words, seizing the till-now vacant niche in Republican politics, that of being the adult-in-the-room.  So, let's start with Ryan's opening moves.

== Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. ==

Upon taking up the gavel as Speaker, Paul Ryan’s first act was removing a portrait of Dennis Hastert from the Speaker's lobby outside the House floor. Hastert, who served in the same position - second in line to the presidency - from 1999-2007, pleaded guilty in a $3.5 million hush money case last week.  

“Two sources with knowledge of the federal investigation told CNN in June that Hastert was paying a former student to stay quiet about allegations of sexual abuse from when he was a wrestling coach and teacher in Yorkville, Illinois.” The plea bargain means that no details will come out in open trial.

You’re kidding, right?  The same Dennis Hastert who called the Clintons the “most-corrupt” politicians of our lifetime? (When not one Clintonite wound up even indicted for malfeasance of office, the first time after a two term presidency.) The Dennis Hastert who screeched at Bill Clinton’s immorality for consensual-adult, hetero-rubbing in a hallway? Who denounced previous speaker Newt Gingrich for the twin sins of divorce and actually negotiating (shudder) with democrats to pass legislation for the good of the nation? 

The Dennis Hastert whose “Hastert Rule” (punish any republican who works on compromise with a democrat) did more than even Fox News to destroy politics as a problem solving methodology in the U.S.?  Thus wreaking more harm on the republic than anyone since Josef Stalin? In other words, Dennis Hastert the deliberate traitor… and now exposed as perjurer, briber, pervert and hypocrite?

Oh… this could not have happened to a more apropos guy. And making that contrast plain by disowning Hastert from the start proves Ryan's ability to grasp the obvious.

Now let's add another factor Ryan must contend with. On the near horizon is a possible limit on electoral cheating. For example, blue Maryland (with a red governor) seems poised to finally end gerrymandering.  Once a cheat performed equally by both parties’ political castes, the practice is now being dumped by ever-more voters in democratic-leaning states.  Republicans are rubbing their hands because not one red state has followed suit.  But that glee is shortsighted.  Yearly, the foul practice is becoming more and more identified as a republican crime, lined up along with rigged voting machines and voter suppression.

And now it looks as if reddish-turning-purple Virginia may do the same. If democrats win, in 2016, there may be a full-court press against these cheats.  And if cheating goes away, then the GOP's demographic problems, failing popularity and starkly horrific governance Outcomes Metrics could add up to disaster for them.

== Presidential politics: The Paul Ryan Gambit? ==

Okay, so the table is set. On to the main topic. I don’t believe in prediction. But I do think folks should offer wagers!  If you think something has a substantial – say 20% -- chance of happening, then offer 1:4 odds!

Here’s one of mine: There is only one ‘mainstream’ Republican office-holder of stature to whom the secret masters of the GOP can turn, if they want to keep ahold of the reins. That’s Paul Ryan.  The new Speaker of the House has gravitas and is growing a Lincolnesque beard… and in the classic GOP pattern, it’s his “turn” as the most-recent Republican Party vice presidential nominee. (Recall I made this point a year ago.)

Oh, sure, it’s too late for Ryan plausibly to enter the debates and primaries.  But that didn’t stop Ryan from recently delivering a major stump speech that one observer said “amounted to a delayed inaugural address.” 

As columnist E. J. Dionne put it: “the most striking aspect of Ryan’s speech is that for all its emphasis on progressives relying on old ideas (they “are stuck in the past,” he said) and conservatives supposedly being more in tune with changing times, his arguments were rooted in the nostrums Washington Republicans have been offering for decades. The angry Republican working class rallying to Trump to express its disillusionment with the status quo will find little in Ryan’s homily to make it reconsider.”   

Having delivered absolutely nothing for working class whites who make up the core of Trump support, you can bet the Cheneyite-Murdochian-Saudi owners of the party are already lighting candles in hope of a brokered convention.  If Donald Trump can be kept below 40% in the delegate count, then it will be a Sumo Match. Those deal-makers versus the big casino deal-maker, with both blocs sifting for swing delegates, and boy will the bribe offers flow! (Hint to all GOP delegates in Ohio, this summer; take recording devices! You’ll get bigger deals!) 

Oh sure, Trump might still prevail! But never underestimate Dick Cheney in a knife-fight. And the Saudis have lots more bribe money than even Donald could come up with.

== The Great Ryan Hope ==

Okay, let’s go with this. Suppose the SMORPs (Secret Masters of the Republican Party) hold the line. They get the 60% non-Trumps to stand fast and throw the convention into a fifth ballot, when it all shifts to horse-trading. And let’s suppose Ryan is the obvious, go-to compromise nominee, unsullied from the previous year of awful gaffes, mud-slinging and hate toxins spewed by the debate participants. Then what?

If by then the fundie-teaparty wing has coalesced around Ted Cruz, then odds are Cruz would get Ryan’s nod to be the ticket’s running mate. 

That would, after all, be in keeping with the GOP’s other grand tradition – of almost never choosing a VP candidate who is remotely qualified to be president. Almost always they choose an unqualified caricature, to pander to the crazy wing and to make the main nominee look sage, by comparison.  That is, after all, how we got Richard Nixon.  All right, except Romney chose Ryan. That jury is still out.

(Democrats have a different tradition.  Their VP nominees are always extremely well qualified and moderate... and stunningly boring.)

Yes, some are asserting that Ted Cruz's growing punch among fundie-tea-partiers and his big war chest make him a strong contender for the #1 spot. I disagree, offering 1:3 odds that Cruz -- despite the fact that most GOP politicians loathe him intensely -- will be the VP pick of any GOP nominee. Moreover I reckon that has been his goal, all along. In that case - win or lose in November 2016 - he becomes the presumptive heir.

Which leaves the Donald. What will he do,if the SMORPS pull the nomination out from under him?   

Under those conditions, he’d naturally teeter toward an angry, third party run! (Oh, please?) The bluster and anger will be volcanic! 

And yet… my guess is the fix will be in. Under the table. Only to calm down Trump will require - literally - billions.

Again, I give this whole scenario 20%.  Which is huge, given how many dice are in the air, right now.  Less than likely? Sure. But you can bet there are moguls on golf courses discussing exactly this.

== Do you think it actually matters? ==

Dig this well.  Choosing among the whole bestiary, from Rubio and Cruz to Carson and Jeb, any Republican president - except maybe Donald Trump - will enter office accompanied by the entire panoply of Cheney-Bush factotums.  Period.  Their cabinet and sub-cabinet functionaries -- and bill-writing lobbyists -- will be drawn from the same well. Almost all of them either crooked or else compliantly banal, and determined to use the citizen-taxpayers as cattle.

You aren’t voting just for the top guy — (though any Bush is automatically a cadet member of the Saudi Royal House) — you are voting for their whole community. At least 10,000 of them, the same stunningly corrupt and incompetent ‘brain trust’ that sent steeply downward every single unambiguously attributable metric of US national health, across both Bush administrations.

== Oh… about the Infrastructure Bill… ==

… the legislation that Paul Ryan is so proud of?  So why has the GOP-dominated House finally passed an infrastructure bill?  Two reasons.  Delay any longer and bridges will start collapsing, and people will know whom to blame.  Also, they now realize it is too late to sabotage the economy anymore.  They managed to slow recovery for 7 years, hoping to pin it on Obama.  Now the rate of improvement is so high they might as well give up and turn to other tactics.

But don’t worry, they are still true to form, as when the GOP passed Medicare Part D, the only entitlement without provision how to pay for it. On this occasion, rather than raise the 22 year old gas tax — which has always paid for roads — they “funded” the transportation bill by raiding Peter to pay Paul:

“Transportation traditionally has been funded by the federal gas excise tax, on the sound reasoning that people who drive on highways should help build and maintain them. Yet this tax, stuck at 18.4 ­cents per gallon since 1993, no longer raises sufficient revenue. And for political reasons the House leadership ruled out an increase — blocking Democrats from even bringing the issue to a vote on the new, more open House floor. Instead, the six-year bill cobbles together financing from expedients: one-time strategic petroleum sales; ostensibly improved tax compliance; and, most dubiously, a raid on the Federal Reserve’s capital.”

Selling our petroleum reserve? When oil prices are low? Say what? 

That is the diametric opposite of how governments are supposed to behave.  Ask any Pharaoh or Caesar.  They knew — you stockpile the warehouses when grain or other resources are cheap — both building a reserve and boosting producer prices when farmers etc are in pain.  Then you sell when prices are high, both lessening scarcity and re filling the Treasury to do it over again. But for twenty years, the GOP has made a concerted effort to do the diametric opposite, selling not only from the petroleum reserve precisely at market-bottom, but nearly all of our strategic reserve of helium and other resources in sweetheart deals, at dirt-cheap prices.  

The helium thing was so egregious that people should have gone to prison.